Before Salut!, there was what I now call Old Salut!. Same blog, different home. The move from Blogspot to Typepad was intended as an upgrade, since I was persuaded by my friend and web guru Craig McGinty that it was worth paying a little for the enhanced presentation and additional features.
The idea was that everything posted at Old Salut!, from its inception in Oct 2006 until the changeover last year, would be transferred to this, the new site.
But not quite everything came with me, as I shall explain.
First let me remind you that Salut! mark two was born on April 16 2007, in my den in the south of France, located somewhere beneath what you see above. I had no way of knowing, incidentally, that a year to the day later, I'd be thousands of miles away, working on the first edition of a brand new newspaper, The National, in the Middle East.
This is how I announced the creation of the new site:
Welcome to Salut!'s new home.I hope and believe that regular readers will quickly see the wisdom of this move. You will still find most, if not all, of what I do here back at its original location but this is where the site's development will be concentrated.
Your thoughts on the change are warmly invited. Until further notice, it is entirely up to you to post comments to either site, to both of them or to neither.
Within days, I had stopped posting simultaneously to both old and new sites. Soon after that, I closed Old Salut! to further comments.
Craig was right. I have never regretted the move. Typepad seems cleaner, sharper and more versatile.
But many of the items imported here at the time of the move came with Flickr images that would no longer open, since they "belonged" not at the Blogspot site but at Flickr itself. All items came in a format that looked, when viewed at the new host address, as if I had just chucked the text into the system without arranging paragraphs, spacing etc. In other words, a mess.
A few have been tidied up, usually after I needed to make a cross-reference to them. In due course, I will get around to massaging all the others that came over from the original blog.
Until then, if ever you wish to consult something written at Salut! before April 16 2007, you will find it easier on the eye at Old Salut!, a link to which appears elsewhere in this posting and also in the Salut! Choice section of the lefthand sidebar.
If you live in the UAE, it may even be a novelty to be able to read Salut! at all. An unexplained problem between Typepad and internet services makes it impossible for most people here to view any part of the Salut! group. If anyone knows why, can they tell me?
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